tivated, it is not at all clear that the circumstances he or she will experience in the new land can be considered "receptive," and for many Chinese and Japanese immigrants their experience was not "receptive" at all.
Portes and Rumbaut also emphasize that early immigration literature emphasized the concept of marginality, also seeing immigrants as achieving a release, a new freedom, in their new surroundings. They were supposedly to discover that certain experiences were now secularized that had formerly been sacred, meaning that their old society was more restrictive, more controlling, often through religion, while their new society opened up a world of possibilities previously denied them. At the same time, it was admitted that the "marginal man" would also experience inner turmoil, instability, restlessness, and malaise: "This counterpoint between newly found enlightenment and the stresses associated with it was to permeate analyses of the phenomenology of immigration for years to come" (pp. 146-147).
Portes and Rumbaut are interested in the psychology of immigration and in mental disorders that may result from the immigrant experience. They note the evolution of psychiatric thinking about the subject and the evidence used in earlier times as to higher suicide rates and other problems associated with the immigrant population. The authors find that the incidence of psychopathology in the immigrant population is high and attribute this to the pressures of being immigrants. However, an interesting finding from their study is that the process of acculturation is more stressful than being an immigrant and that many disorders are more prevalent among members of the population who have been more acculturated, or Americanized. Drug abuse is one type of psychopathology that is noted as occurring more commonly among the more acculturated. The author
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